Gunshots
by Cedargirl
Summary: Gunshots are powerful when it comes to changing fates. These are the 3 gunshots that changed, Billy the Kid's life the most. The shot that killed his first man, the shot that killed him, and the shot that indirectly saved the world. T for death and swears
1. The first shot

Gunshots

It is amazing how something that is not alive, that is smaller than a large insect, and isn't even sharp can alter lives so quickly. There is a bang. A body may fall. A life may be cut. Another life may change.

And once this change has occurred, it is irrevocable.

There's no going back.

You can't take back a bullet.

If you put your finger to the trigger, you'd better mean it. Because when you pull the trigger, it is out of your control.

Billy the Kid knew this. He'd learned it the hard way.

The first shot changed his life forever.

Looking back now, it was stupid. He shouldn't have let it get to him. Windy Cahill had been just another bully. He'd always dealt with his type before.

Cahill had annoyed him, with his cruel jokes, and "playful" combat. Shoving him around, ruffling his hair like he was three. He'd laughed it off. At first. Then it had gotten worse. The joking edge vanished. Combat quit being "funny".

Then one day, it became fatal.

He'd walked into Atkin's catina exhausted. He hadn't been thinking much. He'd staggered in there, plunked himself down at a table, and tried to regain some sense of anything. Today life had been cruel. People generally didn't give him a hard time, but it still happened. Mainly when it hit home that no matter how hard he tried, he was still just a skinny seventeen year-old. And a horse thief.

_Mama would've been so proud. _he thought, wryly. _Seventeen years old, and almost nothing to my name, nothing to back me up but talk. _This job at Camp Grant hadn't been easy to get ahold of. The words of the hirer still stung a bit.

"_You're what, son, fourteen, fifteen?" "I'm seventeen. I work hard sir. I know it doesn't look like it, but I'm up to any job you can give me." _The man had shaken his head, marvelling a bit at his audacity. "_Well you know what? Since you can handle anything, kid, we'll see how you do as a teamster. you start today." _

It could have been worse. Anything to leave behind stealing horses and selling stolen saddles. He wouldn't have made it much longer at that. He was too recognizable. He didn't want to hang.

A crash of the door into the catina shook him out of his daze. Oh lord. It was Windy Cahill. Billy ducked his head lower, trying not to be...darnit, too late. Cahill was headed his way.

Windy Cahill swaggered up to the bar, and ordered a drink. Swirling it in his hand, he swaggered towards Billy. The Kid could practically feel the tormenting already. He broke a rule of his. He raised his head and gave Cahill a glare. Cahill felt the challenge in his gaze, acknowledged the threat.

"What are you looking at pimp?"

That one word was the pebble that started the avalanche.

"Your ugly face, you son of a bitch." The words were out of his mouth before he could rethink them. He could see at once that it had been a stupid stupid stupid terrible idea to say that.

Cahill's face darkened. "No where near as ugly as I'm gonna make yours."

Billy saw it coming. Another day he might have avoided it, but not today.

Cahill grabbed him by the shoulders, and flung him on the floor. He then kicked him hard in the ribs and dropped his knees onto Billy's chest, grabbed his throat with one hand and slugged him in the face.

Cahill obviously meant buisiness. A second, then a third blow landed on his face. He struggled, but Cahill outweighed him by close to 200 lbs and he had no chance. Billy tasted blood. Nobody was intervening.

He was going to die. Windy Cahill was gonna beat him into bloody pulp, then throw his corpse to the dogs.

In a panic, his free hand began worming towards his belt, where he had a .45 pistol.

In a frenzy, he managed to drag it from his belt, and cock the gun, before pressing it against Cahill's side, and pulling the trigger.

A gunshot tore the world apart, and left his ears ringing.

Windy Cahill fell backwards off of him, trailing blood onto the floor. Billy scrambled back from him, and before anybody could react, he ran for it.

The cantina's patrons stared after him. Cahill was gasping on the floor. A horse bolted by outside. For a minute no one moved, then people started running outside to see where the Kid was headed, hurrying towards Windy Cahill and calling halfheartedly for a doctor. As much as the man was disliked, the camp needed its blacksmith.

Their calls didn't accomplish much. Doctor, or no doctor, the blacksmith died the next day. Windy Cahill had been just another bully. Now he was a dead bully.

Billy rode for a day, before he finally nearly fell off of the horse. As he slid awkardly to the ground, he noticed the blood on his shirt, that had spurted after he'd...the realization of what he'd done suddenly hit him.

He'd killed a man.

The Kid lost it then. He threw up. He cried. And the thing that sickened him the most, was how easy it had been. A finger to the trigger. A man dead. All his fault.

He'd broken a sacred rule of wielding a gun.

_Before you draw your gun, be certain that you mean it._

That first shot changed everything. A second shot nearly ended it.


	2. A Second Shot

**Hey guys I forgot to put an author's note on the first chapter. so here it is now :)**

**I don't own SOTINF because Michael Scott, owns it, and alas, alack, last I checked, I wasn't him. **

**'Gunshots' is quite literally a three shot story, this is the second shot, so there's one more coming after this. :)**

**As always, please read and review. It makes me happy when I get reviews. I always appreciate any comments you may have, or suggestions.**

* * *

><p>The second shot was fired when he was barely 22 .<p>

It was a few months after he'd had the strange encounter with the Native American man who he'd saved. The man had said something about repaying him, and giving him a gift, then had placed a hand on his head and started to speak in a language that Billy couldn't understand. The Kid didn't remember much after that. He'd woken up several hours later lying on the ground where he'd been...cursed? Blessed? It had been weird, but other than a headache he didn't feel very different. But lord, the sunlight was bright...

A few weeks later, he rode into Fort Sumner.

Second stupidest mistake of his life.

He'd stopped at a friend's house to stay for the night. Later in the evening, his friend had decided that he was going to cook a piece of beef and brew some coffee. Only he didn't have the beef. Pete Maxwell, his neighbor and friend had just slaughtered a yearling bull and had it hung in the back kitchen pantry.

"I'll brew the coffee, while you go get the beef. Just go in, he'll have left the door unlocked. I told him I might be around there sometime."

"Alright. I'll be back in a minute."

He'd taken the knife his friend handed him and walked on over. It was pretty late, and there was nobody in sight. He got to the porch and walked quietly up the steps and let himself in the door. He quietly walked down the hall, and paused for a second.

He could hear hushed voices coming from Pete's bedroom. Did the man have company over? He wasn't about to interrupt. He kept on down the hall.

Then nearly jumped out of his skin when he nearly tripped over two men sitting outside the bedroom door.

One of the guys jumped up.

"Whoa! Don't be startled!"

What kind of idiot wouldn't be startled? He quickly backed away from the men, into Pete's bedroom door. When he got through the door, he quickly strode over towards Pete's bed.

"Pete...Who are those fellows outside?"

Pete didn't reply for a second, before saying quietly "That's him."

Billy had realized almost immediately that the words had not been meant for him. There was somebody else there. He took a step forward.

"Pete?"

He could see somebody else sitting on the edge of the bed now. He began to back away.

"Quien es?" Who's that? The man didn't respond. The Kid repeated the query, thoroughly alarmed. Who was this guy?

Then he caught a glimpse of light reflecting off of...the barrel of a pistol.

What happened next was likely one of the best and worst things that could possibly have ever happened to him.

Before he could blink, breathe what might be his last, or think "I may be about to die," let alone react, there was a bang.

A spark from the gun.

Time seemed to slow down. At first he thought the bullet had missed him. Then he felt heat spreading outward from a spot in his chest. The heat grew to flames, burning him from the inside out.

Billy felt himself falling backwards, struck by the force of an impact that he didn't remember feeling. Black spots danced at the edges of his vision, darkening as he fell. He could still hear the gunshot, roaring like a bonfire.

Then he hit the floor, and the flames from the bullet turned to ice. As he lay on the floor, the cold seeped like ice water through his veins, and he gasped at the chill. Choked on fluid that was coming up from his lungs. More black spots. Black and red.

No. Not red exactly. Red and purple. Between those two colors. He knew the name of that shade. He'd heard it before, but he was two cold to remember, and even though he was gasping for air, he couldn't breathe. The air had turned to ice. Then so did he.

It was quiet.

* * *

><p>Darkness. Pain. The only two things he could feel. Right now the only things in the world were the darkness, the pain, and the hard, coarse surface he was lying on. The cold was gone. The flames were back, and they were sucking up all the air. He couldn't breathe. He was suffocating.<p>

He forced open his eyes, panicking. It was dark, in this world. His eyes began swimming in and out of focus, until he could see small slits of light directly above him. He tried to shift towards the lights. That was what was supposed to happen, right? But when he shifted, a wave of pain shot through him.

Being dead wasn't supposed to hurt, was it?

The lights swam into focus. The light was filtering through long cracks in the ceiling. The ceiling that was only 4 inches above his face.

The panic burned stronger. Where was he? He didn't think that death was this confined.

This was...where was...No...

He pushed against the ceiling, ignoring the agony, and felt his forearms scrape against wooden boards, and then pushed against the walls, inches from his shoulders. The front of his shirt was wet, and in the center, near his heart, there was the pain.

What had happened? He'd been...been...he'd been shot! Holy shit! He was...it dawned on him where he was, and suddenly he was panicking for all he was worth, shoving against the lid, kicking, trying to force his way free. He had to escape.

They had nailed him into a coffin.

He was going to be buried alive.

Struggles subsided as he realized there was no way for him to escape, but panic didn't.

Somehow, he wasn't dead. Yet, but if they buried him, he didn't think he'd last too long.

He thought about screaming, then at once fought the urge, because if he did, the people who had hunted him down and shot him would shoot him again. Properly this time, between the eyes.

There was no way out of this coffin. One way or the other, he was dead.

Time was seeping by slower than erosion, and breathing became nearly impossible, as if the earth really was burying the coffin, sealing him into the ground.

The coarse walls began to close in on him, as if they were trying to squeeze him to death, tighter than ropes, heavier than a freight train. Blackness came and went, and when it left the walls would surge forward to smother him again.

The lights got brighter and brighter, and then the tiny space that he'd been trapped in for what seemed like years on end heated up like a tiny oven, until he would have died to escape it, and had he been able to draw enough breath to scream, he would've, not caring that that would kill him, because he was already dead if he stayed in this box.

The heat subsided after what felt like hours. Was hours. No, it hadn't been hours, had it? It had been days, or was it years? Millenia had passed and a new epoch had begun outside the box.

The light dimmed, and faded completely, til the whole world had sunk back into darkness, a darkness with out stars, and cold gathered at the edges wait to crawl back in and kill him. Kill him before he could see the stars again.

Darkness crept in further, into his eyes until he shut them to hide from the darkness.

Then a crash shattered the ice, broke the coffin world open, like an egg.

His eyes flew open. The edge of the coffin lid was being forced up by a pry bar. With an enormous sound of creaking wood, and bending nails, the world opened up.

He could see the stars. There was air flooding into his lungs so quickly that he nearly drowned in it.

Then the black shape of someone's body moved across him, blocking some of the sky.

The someone dragged him out of the coffin. He felt his shirt, stuck with blood, trying to hold him there, but the person dragged him free, and he rolled from the coffin, onto the dirt, free from the world he'd been trapped in. He stared up at the stars, while blackness crawled back in, good blackness, quiet, painless, tinged with that same shade of red as before.

Crimson.

That was what it was called.

Billy felt someone's hands press against the bullet wound as the darkness and the flood of air and sky swept him away.

* * *

><p>It was sunny when he woke up next. The remains of a campfire had smoldered quietly, and he'd been wrapped in a blanket, lying on the ground in a small copse of trees. He had sat up slowly, expecting pain, but feeling none, looked and found the bullet hole gone.<p>

He'd expected the someone who he remembered pulling him from the coffin to come back, kept looking for someone returning around the trees. Nobody ever did.

Eventually he'd given up, and began to decide what he should do. He'd started walking, and when he reached the other side of the trees, had spied a town in the distance.

It had only taken him an hour to reach it.

He'd walked down one of the smaller streets, and paused to ask a girl carrying a bundle of clothing what town this was.

"Oh, ", she'd replied, "This is Freedom. I always thought it was a good name, don't you?" She looked at him closely. "I guess you aren't from around here. What's your name?"

Billy had thought about it. He'd started to say 'William Bonney' like always, but stopped. He had been shot. Killed. This was a new start. Billy the Kid, the famous outlaw, was dead and cold in a grave in Fort Sumner.

"I'm Henry McCarty, miss, but everybody calls me Billy."

* * *

><p><strong>Well, that's all for now folks. Hope you enjoyed this chapter! one more coming. I'm considering writing a parallel story to explain how and why 'someone' broke him out of the coffin and saved him. Anybody like this idea?<strong>

**Thanks for reading! please feel free to review! **


End file.
